The Wortley Park Poachers and the Outbreak of the English Civil War

Abstract

On the eve of the Civil War, Sir Francis Wortley's deer park near Sheffield attracted the persistent attention of well armed plebeian poachers. The killing of Wortley's deer was an act of defiance that slighted his honour. His reputation was further undermined by the verbal abuse of several yeoman, prompting him into defending his reputation in the West Riding Quarter Sessions and the High Court of Chivalry. An examination of this litigation leads into a discussion of Sir Francis's concept of honour, distrust of popular politics and identification with the ideology of Charles I's personal rule. A micro-history approach to Sir Francis and his poacher enemies addresses the historiographical debate over whether deference or defiance defined plebeian attitudes to the ruling elite. It also impacts upon the formation of popular allegiance at the outbreak of civil war, and Wortley's brief notoriety as a national figure when he drew his sword for the King at York on 30 April 1642.     

Digging Franco's Trenches: An Archaeological Investigation of a Nationalist Position from the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

As part of a project on the archaeology of the civil war and dictatorship in Spain, a Nationalist position was excavated in the village of Abánades (Guadalajara), which was occupied between March 1937 and the end of the war. The sector that was excavated comprised a trench, two dugouts, and a stone-and-concrete covered trench. The findings reveal more about daily life in General Franco's trenches, while they also offer insights into totalitarian ideology, international involvement in the conflict, and the war economy.     

Excavating Under Gunfire: Archaeologists in the Aegean During the First World War

Abstract

The Gallipoli campaign in 1915 revealed remains of the cemeteries of the Greek settlement of Elaious. French troops from the Corps expéditionnaire d'Orient were assigned to investigate the site, often under Turkish gunfire. This work was supervised by former students of the École française d'Athènes. Detailed plans were made, the finds catalogued, and a published report issued. During the subsequent campaign in Macedonia, the French team made a detailed study of the archaeological remains and objects discovered in the French sector. Ernest Gardner, the former director of the British School at Athens, had been posted to Salonica as a member of the Eastern Mediterranean Special Intelligence Bureau (EMSIB). He studied the finds from the British sector and created a museum for the finds in Salonica. Some other archaeological work continued in Greece during the war years, though not close to the front. Such dedicated archaeological work in a battlefield situation was the precursor to more specialized units that developed during the Second World War.     

Colonial Servicemen and their British ‘War Brides’: First World War Marriages in the British Empire

This article uses the phenomenon and failure of war marriages between British women and ‘colonial’ servicemen, mostly from the settler dominions, to explore the gendered, classed and racialised conditions of migration after the First World War. Positioning this migration of British war brides as part of the continued normalisation of settler occupation, the article demonstrates the patriarchal social expectations to which white women were subject. Fears of ‘khaki fever’ were extended to the protection of naïve ‘colonial’ soldiers from the manipulative sexuality of white, particularly working-class, women and girls. At the same time, ‘respectable’ women were prepared for frontier life and protected from the indignities of bigamy and desertion. The emphasis on their role as ‘daughters of Empire’ meant ‘undesirable’ matches and marital failure, as reported by the press, had consequences for the closeness of the imperial family and the maintenance of white superiority. The mediation of mobility in cases of mixed-race marriage indicate a more explicit, and sometimes violent, policing of the sexual independence of women and Black and indigenous men of colour. In doing so, the article makes an important contribution to understandings of the legacies of global mobilisation and colonial encounters during the First World War.     

The Research and Production Plant,Parkgate, Dublin: Archaeological Investigations of a World War II Munitions Facility

Abstract

This paper describes the structures, operations, and history of the Research and Production Plant, Parkgate, a munitions facility developed by the Irish State in the early years of World War II (referred to in Ireland as 'the Emergency'). Located on the edge of the city of Dublin and within the historic curtilage of Phoenix Park, its emissions were the cause of some controversy and resulted in a local health scare, suppressed and censored by the Fianna Fáil government of the day. The Plant's eventual closure was brought about by complaints from the Office of Public Works regarding severe chemical damage in the adjacent Peoples' Garden and to trees and other vegetation further away in the Park proper. In the meantime, production had switched to service a private concern, which was to benefit further from the arrangement before restrictions on the importation of phosphorus and other chemicals were lifted in 1946. The structures were identified and recorded over the summer of 2007 and the research conducted the following winter, based on files held in the Military Archives and contemporary parliamentary reports.     

British Conservative Opinion and the Problem of Germany after the First World War

This work examines British conservative attitudes towards the Weimar Republic through the lens of several specific issues from the armistice up to the Ruhr Crisis of 1923. The author argues that a curious feature of British conservative opinion following the First World War was the consistent hostility British conservatives demonstrated towards the new German democratic state. To be sure, Great Britain had just fought a long and costly war against Germany, and there had been little time for the passions generated by the war to cool. Still, from the early days of the political changes in October and November of 1918, the German government was firmly committed to democratic principles. This was a development that the British nation claimed to favour, but the war left many British conservatives ill disposed to consider that the ‘inner change’ in Germany might be genuine or that a stable German democracy was possible. During its formative years, the Weimar Republic faced enormous challenges that would have tested any nation. Yet, even as political and economic conditions within Germany undermined prospects for democracy to succeed in that country, many British conservatives declined to take these developments seriously. Indeed, the attitudes of British conservatives substantially added to the difficulties the German government faced in dealing with the problems of the post-war world.     

The Cambridge history of the First World War

This massive study has been produced under the editorship of Professor Jay Winter of Yale University and the Editorial Committee of the International Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, Somme. It attempts a new interpretation of the First World War, based on its transnational and global impact. Some 43 contributions by a ‘transnational’ group of scholars provide a detailed and convincing account of the war, going well beyond more orthodox treatments which emphasize the strategy and tactics involved. In the first volume, Global war, Winter and his colleagues examine, for example, the spread of the conflict to distant continents, together with a discussion of the law of war, atrocities and genocide. Volume II covers the changing nature of the state as the war progressed, the role of armed forces, the sinews of war and the search for peace. Volume III analyses the war's impact on civil society in all its various guises during the conflict; hence we are offered scholarly treatment of, for example, private life, gender and cultural life. This bald summary does scant justice to a magisterial work, an essential resource for those —at schools and universities—who teach the history of the First World War and its impact on domestic and global developments. Of particular interest is the fine reproduction of photos and paintings and the annotated and detailed bibliographies attached to each volume. Winter and his colleagues deserve to be congratulated for providing both the scholar and the interested layperson with an exemplary treatment of an event, the significance of which still echoes down the years.